“The NBA title won’t be legitimate this year.”
“The MLB World Series champion won’t be legitimate this year.”
You have heard those statements from plenty of sports fans in recent months, as various sports leagues and entities try to play in a pandemic.
First, we don’t know if the various sports’ plans to play in 2020 will ever get off the ground. It would be great if they did, and even greater if the sports managed to complete their seasons or at least play for multiple months without any especially serious incident (a player having severe lung damage or strokes from COVID-19, or worse, dying from it). Yet, we really have no idea right now if any sport will be able to finish a season or come close to it. This will be a day-to-day reality in which we hope a worst-case scenario can be avoided. If something awful happens in any sport, though, we know everything will stop, as it should. The main question a lot of people are wrestling with is if sports should even try to go forward this year.
On that specific point, I agree. Sports should TRY.
There is nothing wrong with the mere attempt to play sports. The problems emerge in all the details, such as the NBA marching into hot-spot Florida when Canada — a country which has managed COVID-19 far better than the United States — would have seemed to be the much better and more workable option. (This is why the NHL might have a better chance of completing its season, though that is pure speculation at this point.)
In any discussion about the attempt to play sports in a pandemic, what we need the most is a realistic, grounded, levelheaded awareness of why we are attempting to play sports in the first place.
There are only two reasons.
The legitimacy of the season’s championship is not one of them.
If you care about the legitimacy of the NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL, or college football championship if any of these sports do manage to complete their seasons in the coming months, I have a simple word of advice for you: Don’t.
Do not care about the legitimacy of a title. Stop thinking of these seasons as “tainted” or “not real.”
It’s not because you’re wrong — you’re actually not wrong — but because it doesn’t matter.
So what if these titles won’t be legitimate, due to various star players getting COVID-19 for various lengths of time and therefore missing key games?
So what if these championships won’t be legitimate, due to LeBron James or Nick Saban or Aaron Judge or Patrick Mahomes having to be isolated for 14 days during the season or the playoffs?
None of that matters.
None of that has anything to do with the two reasons sports are trying to go forward in a pandemic, without a vaccine.
There are only two reasons for any of this:
- Gaining television money to prevent the finances of these leagues/organizations from completely cratering;
- Giving the public a needed entertainment-based distraction from the dystopian hellscape of 2020 and the daily avalanche of bad news.
That’s it. That’s the tweet.
Sports are trying to play — as they should — because of economic and psychological needs. No, sports should not be played if even one athlete gets very sick, but until that happens — as long as 100 percent of COVID-19 cases among athletes don’t require hospitalization, ventilator use, or other interventions which point to significant physical damage of a person’s health — sports should go forward.
Obviously, as noted above, the legitimacy of a championship will be instantly wiped away if a star player or coach has to be off the grid for multiple weeks. Everyone ought to know that.
Does that mean a season shouldn’t go forward if the coach or player isn’t severely ill and merely needs to isolate for a couple of weeks? That’s the question we need to wrestle with right now.
Of course a season’s championship will lose its legitimacy if LeBron or Saban or Sidney Crosby or any other mega-star figure has to be separated from his team.
This gets back to the big point, though: The legitimacy of a title is not the reason sports are playing.
Yeah, Clemson might lose a dozen key players before a big game. If “having key players/coaches available” is the metric by which we insist on playing — or not playing — we probably SHOULD pack it up right now and wait for a vaccine.
Yet, if Clemson’s starters aren’t available for a college football game against Florida State, but the Tigers’ second-stringers are all healthy and can play Florida State’s healthy players, and everyone who takes the field has tested negative for COVID-19 in the week preceding the scheduled game, should that game be played?
I won’t tell you the answer is OBVIOUSLY yes, but certainly anyone who says “yes” to that question isn’t being ludicrous… at least not right now.
Again, if just one athlete or coach gets seriously ill, every sport should cease operations immediately, and all this discussion goes away — rightly so. Until we get to that point, however, the tension between maximizing the safety of participants and providing economic and psychological support to Americans is a real one.
A point which has to be mentioned here — in the interests of full disclosure and full accountability — is that if any “relatively” healthy athlete has any history of asthmatic/breathing problems or any prior conditions which might increase vulnerability to COVID-19 or might increase the chances of picking up a more severe version of the virus, THAT particular athlete should be barred from playing. Anyone with increased risk has to be taken out of the pool of participating athletes in any sport.
Yet, among athletes with zero risk factors, should there be no attempt to play whatsoever? It’s not as easy a call as one might think.
Yes, this great experiment could come crashing to a halt very quickly — one athlete getting severely ill would do that. Another scenario which would immediately bring all of this to an end is a team-wide outbreak in which 40 or more players get the virus. Say no more: We’re done if that happens.
But… if there are no severe illnesses, and a small (read: manageable in terms of isolation) number of athletes or coaches get COVID-19, and a team can field a roster for a game, the idea of playing — while certainly and legitimately debatable — is not absurd. It is questionable, but not absurd.
Will sports championships be legitimate this year, if any sports are in fact played? No, they almost certainly won’t be.
That’s not the point of playing in 2020. The sooner everyone is able to accept this, the better.